On the quiet injustice that accompanies the journey “home”
There’s a lot of talk about healing, rediscovery, transformation.
About “being yourself,” “following your path,” “reconnecting with who you really are.”
It’s a discourse full of light—but paradoxically, that’s what makes it incomplete.
Because very few speak about just how heartbreaking the journey to yourself actually is.
No one prepares you for the emotional blood left along the way.
For how much you cry—not for new pain, but for old pain, reawakened.
For how much anger simmers toward the people who should have loved you well but didn’t know how.
This is the quiet injustice of healing:
that it comes with revelations you would have preferred to remain unknown.
That it forces you to see clearly—even in places where you learned to close your eyes out of necessity.
When Love Hurts: On Mothers, Loyalty, and Delayed Anger
Among the deepest ruptures along this path are relationships with parents.
Especially with mothers.
Because the mother—both symbolically and emotionally—was supposed to be the safe place.
But what do you do when safety was, in fact, a gentle prison?
When you were raised with love… that suffocated you, controlled you, erased the edges of your identity?
Many of the subtlest emotional wounds come from dynamics hard to name:
- mothers who impose “their rhythm” while denying your needs,
- parents who tell you “you’re exaggerating” when you express emotions,
- close figures who invalidate your dreams, loves, desires, under the guise of “realism”—a subtle way of sabotaging your ability to dream and desire, to believe you can have more.
Anger toward the mother—the anger you weren’t allowed to feel for fear of losing “love”—is one of the last rooms you enter on the path to yourself.
And one of the hardest.
What isn’t often said about healing:
- It’s not linear. It’s chaotic, with returns, detours, and revelations that burn.
- Sometimes it hurts more than the original trauma. Because now you feel lucid, not anesthetized.
- It’s profoundly solitary. People can be present, but the path is internal, personal, impossible to fully externalize.
- Sometimes it feels like you might go mad. Because you begin to question everything you considered “normal”—including the love you received.
And perhaps the most serious:
Discovering the self doesn’t come only with freedom—it comes with mourning.
Mourning for who you were when you adapted. Mourning for the fantasy of a perfect family. Mourning for what you never received but always hoped to receive.
And yet… why do we continue?
Because once you start seeing, you can’t live in darkness anymore.
Because beyond the anger, tears, and emptiness, you begin to feel that you are real.
That you no longer lie to yourself.
That you no longer live someone else’s version of you.
That you’ve reclaimed the ground beneath your feet.
Și, uneori, în liniștea de după furtună, apare acel moment tăcut în care te uiți în jurul tău, poate în propria casă, printre obiectele tale, în aerul pe care tu alegi să-l respiri, și îți spui:
"Here I am. Now I am. It’s hard. But I am ME."
And maybe it’s not the immediate happiness promised by self-help books.
But it’s something rarer: it’s truth.
And truth, in the end, sets you in place.
And there — in the space where you have the courage to stop lying to yourself —
you find your most steadfast support:
Yourself..